29 entries from February 2010

February 28, 2010

In
an audacious move Adolf Hitler attempted to unite German-heritage people
throughout the world to come to the aid of the Nazi Socialists; it was a
vicious piece of propaganda attempting to inflate the number of possible-Nazis
into the hundreds of millions, showing a sub rosa infiltration of Nazism
throughout the world.

This
map appeared originally in Deutsches
Volkstum in aller Welt (Berlin,
1938) and purported to document far-flung German descendants—the map alone was
perhaps statement enough to many, striking a deep fear thinking about the
20,000,000 Americans alone whose roots could be traced back to the
Vaterland.As a terror and influence
tactic that cost little money, it must have caused the anti-propaganda folks a
good deal of worry.The German/Vaterland
(German American Bund, or Deutsch-Amerikanischer Volksbund) movement never
really gained much popular ground in the U.S., though there was some
significant compliance in business and trade going on at higher levels of
industry and banking.

(I’ve
written about the Nazi-American connections in numerous posts on this blog; all
you need to do is do a site google under “Nazi” and you’ll find plenty. For the
moment I’ll just concentrate on the Henry Ford example.The man was a monstrous moral figure without
an ounce of historical understanding who blamed much of the world’s troubles on
the “Jewish Dictatorship”, which somehow, in his mind, spawned WWI.Long story short, Ford received the Grand
Cross of the Supreme Order of the German Eagle for his friendship and services
to the Nazi state—this friendship extended in form of money and many thousands
of military vehicles, and so on.His was
a treacherous business, his Nazi interests folding very nicely in with his
astounding anti-Semitism. Ford, by the way, received his medal months after the
invasion of Austria,
when he really should’ve known better.I’m not sure if he gave the thing back or not after the war ended.)

But
among the masses, the sentiment never grew into strength, though it wasn’t for
trying.The movement had been present in
the US
since the 1920’s in the form of the National Socialist Party and the Teutonia
Society, though the real start of the American Bund seems to have been with
Friends of New Germany (1933). Right-Wing groups such as America First were
strong sympathizers of Hitler, though they abandoned him once the war
began.(Not so true for Chase Bank, Ford
and many others.)The German American
Bund never topped 100,000 members, though it did fill up MadisonSquareGarden for a meeting in
1939. (One of the main speakers was Avery Brundage, International Olympic
Committee Chair. Brundage survived in this role until Munich in ’72, when he ordered the Olympic
games to continue, unabated, after the 11 Israeli athletes were murdered by
elements of Yasser Arafat’s organizations.)

Amyway,
this map was more a propaganda tool than one of true expectation, and I’m sure
it did its fair share of damage.

This terrific 1933 pictorial display of quantitative data1
showing the comparative military capacities of eleven countries—it will become progressively
and aggressively more wrong in each passing year to the start of WWII.In 1933 the military giant was, basically, France—the same country that would be quickly
and completely overrun just seven years later by the country at the bottom of
this display with the micro graphs, Germany.

The German military forces underwent staggering change after
the end of WWI.The Imperial Forces were
completely done at the end of the war, limited to 100,000 men, left with no air
force and no tanks.There were wide
changes during the WeimarRepublic, the army seeing
three iterations (not to mention the hundreds of Freikorps that were
established with some of the disbanded remnant of the standing army) that
ultimate resulted in the formation of the Reichswehr (in 1921) and which in
turn would evolve into the Wehrmacht in 1935.

Germany
barely registers, barely forms bumps in the flatlines of measurements in
1934.By 1939, six years after the
election of Hitler, and fanned by xenophobic revenge and greedily speedy full-throttled
hate, Nazi Germany rushed at record
speeds towards the rape of the future. The German Wehrmacht stood at 4.7 men.in 1939
(6.6 million in 1940; 8.1 in 1941; 9.5 in 1942; 11.2 in 1943, 12 in 1944, and 9
in 1945), while the Luftwaffe was at 400,000 (growing to 1.7 million by 1943) and had enormous growths in quantity and quality
of armaments.It was all astonishing, and almost all gone again in another six years.

This is an exclusive graphic of German nothingness, an accurate graphic in 1934 and again in 1945, but in the middle, it was totally incorrect. Twelve years from nothing to nothing, with the disgust of Hell to pay in between.

It is simply extraordinary to see the disparities of the
Nazis displayed so

February 27, 2010

“Why,
they must spit two or three gallons a day!They ain’t died fast enough, these old men!”—Mrs. T.E. Bagley, Whitney, Texas,
1949

This
is a great small America story about sitting. Or old men sitting, and spitting.Sitting and spitting on a long piece of thick
timber outside a drug store, bricks and advertisements as back support, in
Whitney, Texas (population ca. 1,500), in 1949.I can just about hear them on a hot summer evening, right now, only
probably I couldn’t—they’d probably’ve shut up until the stranger walked by,
giving me their silence and keeping their confidences.Or not.Maybe I would’ve been invisible, and the whittled bits would've fallen to the street along with the tobacco juice, cusses and gossip, unabated.Maybe they surrounded themselves with a stained-moat of spittin’s across
or close to which no one would stray.

It
isn’t, I guess, so much a story about their sitting as it is a story about
their not sitting, about how it came to be that their lumber was removed and
the men forced to find another place to take in the sights and construct their
great edifices of commentary and asides.

The
story appears in LIFE Magazine of 15 August 1949, and lays the whole drama out
in two splash pages, with bare editorializing and some great photos.

The
story goes like this: “In 1922 D. (Doctor Dee) Scarborough,
the druggist in Whitney,
Texas, put
up a bench outside his store, and immediately it became a loafing headquarters
for the gaffers of .the BrazosRiverValley.
'Year after year they sat there looking like a jury of irritable terrapins,
whittling, spitting and passing judgment on everything that passed. But finally
reform caught up with them.” It caught up to them, even if everyone was wearing a collared shirt.

It came to the mayor of Whitney, Frank Basham, to appease “a
delegation of local housewives” who were fed up with the old men, and wanted
the “unsightly bench” gone.It was
probably a lot more than the bench, as the quote above by Mrs. T.E. Bagley contends:
“Why, they must spit two or three gallons a day!They ain’t died fast enough, these old men!”.
Perhaps a dozen old
farmers/ranchers/cowboys sitting on a bench all day long spitting and watching
the world go by wasn’t the most attractive thing for downtown Whitney.

And
so it came to pass that the lumber was removed, but not the men—they returned
with nail barrels and took up residence, unabated, “sitting wrathfully” on the
kegs.The police then threatened to
confiscate the kegs, and then the men: tensions flared, and a special election
was held, a referendum on whether or not to restore the bench.

“I’ve
never heard of such foolishness”, ‘cried 97-year-old Tom Rose, dean of the
bench sitters’. “Come here in ’77 from Tennessee.
Been married 76 years, and my wife ain’t whipped me yet.”

The
vote was held and the forces of bench-removal-evil were “horribly” beaten, the
vote for favoring restoration coming in at a convincing 124 to 67.

The
picture below shows the men “triumphantly” hauling the bench back into
position, sitting back down once more, “loafing, whittling, spitting and
passing judgment on everything that passed”.

As I said, this is a beautiful drama of high emotion, way-of-life small consequence played big, a heaping slice of American life witnessed in a small East Texas town just after World War II. I would love to hear the voice of Mrs. Lizzy Smith (pictured here) as she was thinking-out-loud, casting her vote in this debate with a pencil no longer than a finger joint. (Where did that hat/shawl come from? Is it her mother's? Mrs. Stewart's mother would've been born around 1840, which means that the sensibility for that head cover was at the very least of pioneer vintage, and possibly older. It looks like living history to me, a snapshot into something from the deep past, right there in the present. This doesn't happen very often; but when it does, it is a celebration.)

"We're all living on borrowed time" she is quoted as saying, and I imagine that she voted for the men to be able to return to their bench to use what time they had left to holding up the walls of that pharmacy. [I made a call to Whitney, this morning, and spoke with a gentleman about the Battle of the Bench. He eloquently relayed the story, and the place that it holds in the town's history, its small action carried into the future as a very large sensibility-- I'm thankful for his insight. I couldn't resist asking what it was that was directly opposite the bench; what were these men looking at when they weren't looking down. "Not very much" he said. But the story isn't in the looking, its in the talking; and as my wife Patti Digh finely points out, stories seem to be best told side-by-side.

February 26, 2010

The fabulous Black-Daylite Television, brought to the well-heeled by General Electric, boasted superior reception qualities in a 250-pound wooden cabinet with electronic tube-y warmth. For example, the gentleman in the photo was sitting there in his living room in Wilmington, North Carolina, confident with his fine camouflaged shoes (blending in perfectly with his floor), with the ability to choose between the programs coming from Jacksonville, Charlotte and Norfolk...getting "all 3 stations".

The photo is pretty deceptive: judging by the tiles on the floor, the television set is almost as long as the lounging chair, and if Mr. Bell's shoes are a foot long, then the picture he's receiving is just a wee bit bigger. The set retailed for about $700, which in today's dollars comes out to about $9500--it was expensive, and cost as much as some modest cars.

It is a bit odd to compare these three relatively contemporary
works on the human heart and to see their points of correlation and (vast)
departure. The first belongs to Jean Senac, whose Traite de la Structure de Coeur…(published in 1749) was one of the
most valuable works on the 18th century on the heart, laying a firm
foundation for the study of its pathology.Senac

(1693-1773, born in Gascony
and later physician to Louis XV) was the first visitor to many aspects of the
heart’s physiology, describing delation (as the most common evidence of cardiac
pathology), correlated hydrothorax with cardiac failure, pericarditis, and much
more—he also published exquisite illustrations by Jacques Poitier to accompany
his text.

The next image is the first to properly describe the nerves
of the heart, and was published in the magnificent Antonio Scarpa’s Tabulae neurologicae ad illustrandam
historiam anatomicam cardiacorum… in 1794.Scarpa was a monumentally

accomplished anatomist who was also a gifted
artist, and it is his own work that illustrates this masterpiece.The original edition of this work is huge,
atlas-sized, and the images of the heart are life-size and float in plenty of
free, very wide and perfect margins.

On the other end of the spectrum we have this liturgical
philosophical anatomy of the stages of the heart in grace and disgrace. Mostly I’m interested in the foul part, which
shows the advanced mortification of the organ in seating the throne of Satan. The
edition here is The Heart of Man, either
a Temple of God or the Habitation of Satan1, and
is a very heavy-handed 1842 illustrated edition from Harrisburg (PA) version of
a French text of 1732.It is illustrated
with ten versions of the state of the heart, ranging from perfect grace to the installation
of the Beast, and several points in between, the degrees of gaining and losing
each station.

The first image shows the heart of man completely dominated
by Satan, with Man the sinner’s troubled face (along with the mark of Cain (dominating
his wayward organ.The emblematic
animals infesting his heart include the peacock (with its misleading
haughtiness), goat (“a lascivicious, stinking animal” representing “unchastity”
and impurity), hog (gluttony and intemperance), snake (seducer), tiger (cruelty
and ferocity) and tortoise (indolence). They chase from the hear the holy ghost
and an angel, and allow the presence of Satan (front and center).

The second image is interesting in that it shows the
movement of a bad/evil/wicked heart to a more pious one, though it is just in
the transition stages.In my experience
it is uncommon to see an emblematic illustration of a half-way point of, well,
anything; this woodcut seems to capture, to be a snapshot so to speak, of the
human heart undergoing transformation.

Notes:

1. The original title was something along the lines of Spiritual Mirror of Morality, in which every
Christian, who desires his salvation, may view himself, know the state of his
soul, and profitably learn to regulate his life according to it. Hardly gender-neutral,
the title makes four specific gender references to men.

February 25, 2010

Sometimes things are designed that are so bulbous and so inflated and so terribly hyper-packed that they are just destined never to be built beyond the imagination.Among the largest of these things meant for the air was desined by a particularlystreamlined designer, Norman Bel Geddes, who basically owned the concept of aerodynamic function at all levels of design in the 1930’s.

But Bel Geddes’ apoetically-named aircraft, Airliner 4, is an entirely different issue.It may possibly be the largest, slowest, lowest, fattest and most lumbering plane ever designed. (And by this I mean that it stood a chance of actually being built and flown, as opposed to the monsters with wing-topped tennis courts and such.)

This 530'-long 1.2 million pound beast took an hour to climb to its max ceiling of 10,000 feet where it would cruise along at an astonishing 100 mph. It would wind its way lovingly across the country, slicing off its travel hours like frozen bologna, 30 hours from coast-to-coast, slowly, methodically, so as not to disturb its 600 passengers in their sleeping rooms. But I'm not sure how much sleep would get slept, what with 20 (!) 1900 hp engines screaming overhead.

The passengers who didn't sleep could do a lot besides sit and be serviced by the aircraft's crew of 155--they might actually need guides to get them through the oddness of the plane's 9 decks, 3 kitchens, 2 dining rooms, solarium, 100-couple dance floor, gym, barbershop and medical offices (with waiting room). Plus much, much more. (I like a plane with a doctor's office waiting room; perhaps the real genius would've been to come up with the smaller, more interior, extra waiting room to which one graduates before seeing The Doctor.)

Getting closer to the ground is the plan for the Chicago Civic Center (1909) by the usually accomplished Daniel H. Burnham. This beast looks more like a stubby nuclear- pulse intergalactic Mothership than anything that anyone would have wanted to build on the ground—at least in space it would be out of sight.

In a struggling prose reminiscent of Lewis Sullivan Burnham writes1: “The Civic Center will be dependent for its effectiveness in the character if the architecture displayed in the buildings themselves…” which I think is self-referential, stating that the architecture’s effectiveness is dependent upon the architecture. If this is the case, the enormity of the Civic Center doesn’t save it from itself.

Staying in Chicago we find another proposal, this for the ChicagoTribuneTower competition of 1922—many of the works submitted seem to my eye big and wide and ugly, but perhaps none more so than that offered by Ludwig Koloch. This may well have been a nice design for the top third or so of a building, but not for three thirds--and actually, this may be four-thirds. It reminds me of something rising from the sands at a beach in the future, the remnants of destroyed civilizations. Without the apes.

February 24, 2010

Norman Bel Geddes (1893-1958) made fast, bulbously sleek and varyingly aerodynamic objects and ideas, and was a vastly successful designer of things ranging from sets for the NY Metropolitan Opera House to telephones to cars to locomotives to the housing for the Mark I computer. Ideas were his metier, and there seemed no lack of them--good, mostly; bad, sometimes.

Bud bad ideas can be beautiful, and elegant, if only for a very short period of time in which they might have actually functioned for the good. One of these blisterers was his floating airport for the NYC harbor. Passengers would access the airport via a 800-foot automatic walkway tunnel, and then up to various shuttles and such on the levels below the flight deck. This beast floated on columns floating on mobile caissons just above the harbor bottom, enabling the whole to be turned into or away from the wind, making for easy approaches and departures for the planes. But it is the pilot of the airport that seems most interesting to me, steering the giant propellers that lay under the corners of the structure, pushing the airport into/away from the wind.

This may well be the largest mobile steerable structure moving along the shortest courseway conceived as a possibly-buildable project of the twentieth century.

February 19, 2010

I remember seeing a film (with sound) many years ago, when I was little, back in the mid 1960's, of a V-1 in flight. The flying bomb issued a terrifically awful sound, punctuated by the silence when its engine turned off and it fell to its target in silence. It sounds like death.

[The V-1, or Vergeltungswaffe 1, (“retaliation”, or “vengeance” weapon), or Fieseler
Fi 103, or Buzz Bomb, or Doodlebug, was a flying bomb (on the order of a very primitive
cruise missile guided by a gyroscope autopilot) launched against population centers
in England by the Nazis during the June 1944-January 1945 period. The bomb was about 27’ long and 17’ wide,
weighed 4,700 pounds, and reached 400 mph with an 1,800 pound warhead.Its 8,000+ sorties killed more than 6,000
people.]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1qsBGTkVSk&feature=related
And again:
And again, here:

Ranters,
Diggers, Manifestarians, Puritans, Muggletonians, Shakers, Quakers, Levellers, Seekers…terrific names all for religious or religioesque movements, most now
gone, though it seems that of the most-gone the Ranters are probably the
most-goned gone--which must’ve been a function of their unstated aims of not
having a particular course of action.As
an anti-movement their movement was tautologically doomed, as they flourished
for only a decade or so, sandwiched into the very full mid-17th
century.

{The image above is an illustration from the book, Hell Broke Loose... below. It also is a pretty tame version of other images that show more nudity/drinking/sexual activities.]

Ranters
were an English Free Spirited heretical group of wide interpretation of social
and moral value. Their questioning of the potency of the man’s fall doctrine
steamed together with a quasi-semi-millenialism evidently led to an
alehouse-based loosening of socially governed restraints. According to the many People magazine-like pamphlets and soft
porn reporting, their activities made for sugary eating by the bawdy-eyed ha’penny
people buying gossip in cheaply printed formats.Free of Sin and Law, the Ranter celebrations
were soaked in alcohol and nudity, which are ripe pluckings for any non-serious journalist, then or now.

Judging from the list of publications (listed below in the "Continued Reading" section) there must've been a very immediate lusty interest in the Ranters' lustily interesting ways. I've written this post for the simple interest in one particular, extraordinary title: [with apologies for the underlining, but I cannot convince the Typepad gods to remove it.]

Hell broke loose: or, the notorious design of the wicked Ranters, discovered on Sunday last at Black-Fryers Being a true relation of the strange proceedings of Mr. Vaughan, and his wicked proselytes; and their entring of Black-Fryers church in sermon time, like so many spirits from hell, with four damnable papers in the hands, containing such horrible, audacious, and abominable songs, the like not to be parallel'd in former ages. With the manner how this onsolent Ranter traced the streets from Black-Fryers to Saint Paul's Church-yard, in his Holland shirt, without doublet or breeches, a treble cap, like the Pope's miter, with silk fring, and white shooes, and stockings. With their damnable plots, and conspiracies against the ministers of the gospel: their examination before the right honourable the Lord Mayor of London; the sad and woful speeched, made by the ringleader of the Ranters, concerning the city magistrates, and golden chains: and the committing of them to Bridewell till the next sessions. 1650

See? That's just fabulous, and represents a Title Page Extravaganza that seems to be a 17th century feature--including as much as humanly possible on a title-page. As does this book, with all manner of detail in the title, not the least of which is the description of a man running around with no pants but with a Pope's mitre and white shoes and socks.

The 17th century "Hell Broke Loose" extended-title (but non-Ranter) category has a number of other entries in it, too, for published books, including the following lovilies:

Hell broke-loose; upon Doctor
S--ch--ve--l's sermonsor, Don Quevedo's vision, of an infernal cabal of Whiggish papists and
popish Whigs in Utopia; upon a mock-tryal of the doctor. Translated from the
original; by Jack the Spaniard.1713

Hell broke loose, or, An answer to the late bloody
and rebellious declaration of the phanatiques, entituled A door of hope,
&c.wherein their horrible conspiracy against our gracious soveraign, and the
city of London, in their late rebellion is discovered : together with a brief
view of our lives, manners and malice of those desperate and unparallel'd
traytors. 1661

Hell broke loose :or an history of the Quakers both old and
new. Setting forth many of their opinions and practices, published to antidote
Christians against formality in religion and apostasie 1660

Some of the other big-title Ranter titles from this time include the following:

February 18, 2010

"The Edge... there is no honest way to
explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who
have gone over.

"--(Dr.)Hunter S.Thompson

Oddities
and Curiosities and the Tryphiodorus Award

Sometimes
things that were just done because they could be done aren’t necessarily an
accomplishment—they may use letters in the alphabet and make words, but the
words really don’t seem to take us anywhere.Literally.There is a literary practice (and I mean this in a medical
or forensic sense) in which the writer chooses to not use a particular letter
of the alphabet, abandoning it for very private reasons into the dustbin of
abandoned alphabet letters. (That dustbin is generally empty until one of these
people show up with the idea of filling it, unless of course we expand the
dustbin to include punctuation, and then it gets filled rat her quickly (though
not in the Steinian sense).)

The
work which most filled the alphabet dustbin more than any in history is probably the
Odyssey of Tryphiodorus (a Greek grammarian who flourished in Egypt ca. 4th century ACE) effort
written in 26 parts, each segment abandoning one letter of the alphabet until
each letter had been completely omitted from one section.. The author could
have a lot of time by writing this 26-part cycle in all at once, in one part,
abandoning all 26 letters at the same time—this may have produced a more
elegant result (with the Bellman’s map coming to mind).

This
Odyssey may have produced a sort of a
lipogramic palindrome, in asquinty-eyed
way.

Which
brings me to this odd structure proposed by real estate mogul and hyper-builderWilliam Zeckendorf, whose vision brought to
the pages of LIFE magazine in 1942 (?) avery tall completely automated structure designed for nothing but car
parking. People would drive to NYC in their own cars (!) and park them in this
car hotel; the car functions would be given over completely to the building, moved
into their spots and juggled and finessed into position by conveyors and forklifts
and such.

Cars
in a building, moved about free of humans, rested; humans on the street making
their own human traffic.The whole idea,
the entire structure, seems backwards to me, the meaning of a building turned
inside out, wanting the essential idea, forwards and backwards being simply a
bad notion.

The
picture of Mr. Zeckendorf—who was tremendously energetic and who had very many good ideas along with these heavily
popularized odd plans—standing in front of a lovely (scale?) model of his
parking structure makes me want to see another, smaller version of Mr.
Zeckendorfand his model standing just
behind it, and smaller one after that, and so on…a fractally bad idea deserving of the Tryphiodorus award for missing the most sense. I bow deeply to Mr. Zeckendorf for trying and for constructing this beautiful (I want it) model.

February 17, 2010

"One conversation centered on the ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue."-- Stanislaw Ulam, May 1958, referring to a conversation with John von Neumann [Ulam, S., “Tribute to John von Neumann”, Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, vol 64, number 3, part 2, May 1958, pp 1−49.] This is also said to be the first use of the term "singularity", referring to the sometime-in-the-future point where artificial intelligence reaches such a level as to create a race of super-intelligent artificially-enhanced human beings.

In the history of perfect tomorrows, what happens to people when we no longer die, or live to enormous ages, or replicate necessary organs to such a degree that cell death is no longer an issue, or are just able to get rid our biological corpus and live in something else?

I can’t tell when the first references start to appear in literature, scientific or otherwise, regarding the sustainability of the population of the Earth, or of simply filling up the Earth, for that matter. This cartoon (above) by Ralph Wilder, published ca. 1915 (source unknown, unfortunately), may well be in the first wave of what must have seemed at the time to be absurd speculation.

It is impossible for me to imagine what the future of medicine and medical technology may hold for all/some of us in the next 150 years.I chose this number as it gets us back to one of the greatest advancements in the history of surgery—sterilizing instruments and keeping the surgical room clean.

This is the work of Dr. Joseph Lister (remember badly via a popular consumable) who in one fell swoop (and over the course of several years) brought the survivability rate for all surgeries up by half or so, an extraordinary feat, and only four generations old.It is less than 400 years ago that William Harvey figured out pulmonary circulation and paid hell for it for many years.To imagine the obverse, the medical advances that will occur in 2400 may be as foreign to educated us here in 2010 as 2010 looked to William Harvey in 1628 or Joseph Lister in 1863.DNA is only a few years older than me (discovered in 1953), and even though its discovery may seem antiqued at this point, the technologies and understanding initiated by that discovery may look as quaintly fundamental to those in 2150 as the necessity of having a clean surgical environment looks to us.

And who knows how advancements may spiral ahead of themselves once intelligent machines start producing machines that are more intelligent than themselves leading to god-knows-what.

But back to the cartoon, and the mathematician Stan Ulam, who is really at the base of this post. The image depicts the Moon as an escape pod for those who could afford it, the signs suggesting that money would determine who had space to lie and who didn’t.Of course, there was the problem of actually getting there, which in 1915 or thereabouts was still science fantasy (being twelve years after the Wrights and four years before Goddard).

The second image, from LIFE magazine in 1941, shows a rather massive space vehicle powered by U-235. Discovered by Arthur Jeffrey Dempster in 1935, U-235 was a fissile material capable of sustaining a fission chain reaction. (Dempster, 1886-1950, was a Chicago Ph.D. who during the war would be the Chief Physicist of the great Metallurgical Lab at Chicago, from 1943 to 1946.) The ad (for an insurance firm) shows the ship being powered by what would be a series of nuclear explosions—quite a remarkable thing to be printing in a mass market periodical in the second year of WWII. As it turns out the Physical Review was still publishing sensitive articles on these topics ‘till right about this point, after which their appearances were suspended for the duration of the war.

And as it turns out the thinking here was prescient.It was Stan Ulam who first suggested this use of atomic energy in 1947; and it was Freeman Dyson and others who (beginning in 1958) took this many steps further with Project Orion.In short, this project was a think-sink for a pulsed nuclear propulsion system for a class of space vehicle that would range in (three) sizes from 8,000 tons to an incredible, space-insatiable 8 million tons.

Yes, that’s 8 million tons.That was for a city-sized space ship with a diameter of 400 metres and which could travel at 20,000-30,000 m/s with meganewton thrust, being pushed along by series of nuclear explosions, carrying fantastic payloads and enabling the construction of vast structures on, well, other places.

I don’t know how the thing would get off the ground.Evidently this was not an issue, for even in the late 1980’s drawings and plans for this monstrous ark were still being published. But even as I write this I wonder if my own incredulity with the possibility of such travel will be seen incredulous to folks just a few generations down the road. I suppose this is just another small stop in the history of the time it takes for absurd ideas to look not so.

February 16, 2010

I think that I'd like to introduce a subset in my Bad Ideas category: Bad Flat Ideas. To start it off, I found this very lovely example in LIFE magazine for 18 March 1946, the brainchild of generally-appropriate real estate mogul William Zeckendorf: a spectacularly bad idea of installing a rooftop airport along a very long swath of property along the West Side.

It seems as though the airport would extend from the bottom third of Central Park south to, well, I really can't tell, perhaps lower midtown? Honestly, it doesn't matter. For all of its size it actually isn't quite big enough, looking like there's maybe 10 or 20 plane lengths margin-of-error at the end of the runway. Plus there's the *no* margin of error bit for the edges of the airport, which assumes that no plane will ever topple over the table top. Plus a host of other pertinent stuff.

The penultimate line: it is also incredibly ugly, a definition of architectural ugliness that few projects could match.

The bottom line though to this project was the bottom line: in the end, the Manhattan Airport would save about 15 minutes travel time to Philly over Laguardia.

I should not leave unmentioned the unmentionable project proposed for poor London (which I wrote about late last year here):

February 15, 2010

Having just finished a post here on missing and duplicated-in-outer-space New York Cities, we return to the more grim possibilities of pre-Cold War cityicide.

I haven't seen very many images at all of NYC under attack, and this one from nuclear attack on NYC from Collier's Magazine (1948) is fantastically poignant, showing perhaps three ground-bursts of atomic bombs in Manhattan and Brooklyn. At the time, 1948, the Soviets had just developed their bomb and I think had no way of getting one here. But this didn't speak to the future, and my guiess is that Collier's was just taking it a little easy with the popular reading clientelle. I can't remember now how many weapons would've been targeted at NYC by the mid-1950's, but I know it wasn't a simple dozen.

A lateral view of this sort of explosion in Manhattan was presented in an extraordinary issue of the liberal PM Magazine, issued with a 7 August 1945 date (though I think it came out a few days later). This would have been just a day after the Hiroshima bombing, and the 12 pages of dedicated coverage t the atomic bomb was really quite spectacular. Included is the following small graphic that appeared on page seven which shows what effect the Hiroshima atomic bomb would have if dropped on New York City—it was no
doubt gigantically sobering to anyone who looked at it, and brought the power of
the bomb and its destruction to a common, understandable point.
I'm not an historian of the first newspaper coverage of the bomb, but
it strikes me that this may well be the first graphic to depict the
effects of an atomic bomb exploded over NYC.

Seeing the Collier's pictures makes it that much more difficult to think about the idea of Buckminster Fuller that would help rid ourselves of radiation anxiety (which I wrote about earlier, here). Fuller’s idea is multiple orders of magnitude removed from the
original idea of the arcade, constructing a dome1 to encapsulate NYC
from the East River to the Hudson along 42nd St, and from 64th to 22nd
St: that’s two miles in diameter and, plus a mile high (or about five
Empire State Buildings pile one on top of the other). I’m not so sure
how this would be built, or how things would be heated or cooled, or
what the construction material was for the skin of the dome, or how
people get in and out, or how you deal with heating and cooling, or how
any noxious chemicals are expelled—but Mr. Fuller thought that the
savings alone from snow removal from NYC streets would pay for the dome
in ten years.

Mr. Fuller also thought that the dome would protect the city (or
this part f the city) from radiation fallout. That could be true,
assuming that of all the hundreds of nuclear warheads that the Soviets
would’ve launched against NYC alone none of them would’ve found their
target, except perhaps for the Ridgways or Staten Island, where the
shock wave or winds produced by ensuing firestorms would not have
disturbed the dome. Of course if a warhead actually came close—or
actually hit—the dome, the protection from radiation would be moot.

Another odd and stomach-wrenching image comes from that devilish scamp Eugen Sanger (dead before he was fifty,
1905-1964), a German rocket designer and engineer for the National
Socialists, went to work for the French Air Ministry following the end
of World War Two after doing his all and thankfully falling short for
the Reichsluftfahrtministerium (RLM, or "Reich Aviation Ministry"). He
worked without rancor there until he was nearly kidnapped by Joe
Stalin—for the purpose I suppose of continuing work on what may have
been his greatest effort, unfulfilled during the war years—the Amerika
Bomber. The Soviets evidently thought that this might come in handy in
1947.

The Sänger Amerika Bomber (or Orbital Bomber, Antipodal Bomber or
Atmosphere Skipper) was designed for supersonic, stratospheric flight,
and had much more bang for the buck than the V2 (10000 feet/second
exhaust velocity, as compared to the later V-2 rocket's 2000
meters/second, 6560 feet/second) and since it was stratospheric had a
far greater range, coming in at better than 14,000 miles. The
22,000-pound weapon carried one large 8000-pound free-falling bomb.

Sanger’s idea in the early 1940’s was to get this bomb to around
Times Square. And since the Amerika Bomber was a relatively inexpensive
weapon compared to the damage it could cause, there was room for
producing a lot of them.

Seeing Manhattan in the cross hairs like this is quite sobering, and it is an image that is rarely made.

Another attack on Manhattan depicted here comes from above, way above, Manhattan decimated by a meteorite "shower" of enormous magnitude. The image appears in an article by Hudson Maxim (1853-1927, brother of the more famous Hiram) "How the World Will End", printed in 1910, and shows dozens of small meteorites striking NYC in the City Hall area.

The last image comes from 1904 and--when taken out of context--it seems
as though Manhattan is in for the worst of it, with a view in front of
the Flat Iron Building of an aerial bombardment of women. This is
probably one of the few bad things that weren't done with/at women, and
would actually predate the first use of explosives being dropped from
aircraft. Unfortunately the original, intended image was a poke at crinoline ,
and featured women being blown up into the air rather than the other
way around, though I like my interpretation better.

NYC has certainly had its imaginary/creative trials and tribulations over the last 400 years or so, but I must say that these two depictions of the state of the city are the most, well, unexpected as any I've ever seen. The first comes from 1902 and is a forward-looking appraisal of the chances of New York City in the near-future. The aeronaut tourists are being told by the aviator/carny--floating above Manhattan in the future, in the year 1920--that those chances are not very good, the city having disappeared under its own weight, sunk by the growing skyscraper1 population in a ground loosened by too-numerous tunnels. The cartoon is a joking editorial, of course, a riposte to the relatively new building jag that pushed big buildings to great new heights. [A post on more realistic views of the City of New York can be seen here]

The second image on the other hand is not a farce; it is one of the strangest (published) unintentionally Outsider, unintentionally Absurdist/Dada works that I've ever seen. It appeared in a post at the very start of this blog (two years and 500,000 words ago) and it remains a capstone of Mondo Bizarro category2.

This 1941 pamphlet isn’t so much “interesting” as it is interestingly illustrated, where all
of the semi-coherent interest resides, the text having left coherence far behind, somewhere, in it own intergalactic dust.

This is the only known example of the depiction of
an extra-terrestrial New York City pictured with the earth in the
background.

Huh? Yes, this is the Big Apple in space—not its own
space but THE space, outer space—somehow, impossibly, removed to some
something-or-other (actually in this case, a “bubble”) that, while not
being the Moon, was something like it, though not actually a solid and
without gravity, floating on a base of floating effluvia and hope, but, well,
you get the picture. Whatever we’re floating on here (actually it is
identified as the “perisohere” (don’t ask)) is very big and very very
close to the home planet.

The author, David Gordon, is certainly after something, but what that "something" is I just don't know. He starts things out for the reader asking a series of questions like “why does
the earth and other heavenly bodies remain in the air and submerged”, answering them with other questions.

In all of this Mr. Gordon produced a work of staggering incredibility, more so since it wasn't an intentional science fiction effort, and in my book any time anyone reveals such a shocking piece of thought deserves a special kind of praise. I'm just thankful that the pamphlet was illustrated.

Notes:

1. The word "skyscraper" appeared in print only nine years before this cartoon (Harper's Weekly, April 1893), thugh the necessary elements like heating and
cooling capacities, electrical lighting, plumbing [with appropriate, siphon jet
toilets], elevators with dependable brakes, had been in place since the 1880's or earlier.